Businesses are increasingly looking for ways to gain a competitive advantage and to be able to do more with less. Business intelligence (“BI”) has been a significant component to achieve these goals through leveraging corporate data and strategically equipping workers with insights that help organizations to focus on what's important and to make sound business decisions to drive performance.
Geographic Information Systems (“GIS”) are systems that integrate software and data to capture, manage, analyze, and display all forms of geographically referenced information. GIS allows users to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualize data in ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and charts.
The majority of business data contains some sort of location information: office locales, customer addresses, sales territories, marketing areas, facilities, and so on. When the technologies of BI and GIS are fused together, organizations can visualize and analyze key business data through “smart” maps to discover patterns and trends that would have been easily overlooked with traditional BI tables and charts. For example, ESRI Maps for MicroStrategy uses ESRI Location Analytics to visualize BI data on a map. The user can select the type of business location to use (e.g., zip code, city, state, etc.) to display business data (e.g., profit, number of customers, etc. in that location). The user can also determine how to render the BI data (e.g., color code states or cities, use bubbles of varying size, superimpose bar graphs, etc.) For many business users not familiar with mapping software, this requires a lot of configuration to be done to generate a report, and can be a daunting task. It would be desirable to simplify the process for a typical business user.